1. Field
The present disclosure is in the field of connecting and associating information with other information. In particular, it relates to methods, systems and devices for capturing and correlating annotations or other information with information originally contained in (or printed on) documents. Correlating may be done through semantic analysis and other techniques and may involve using a time and/or date associated with each bit of information during the process of association. Annotations or other information may be in the form of hand-printed, hand-written, and printed characters, and in any other form such as a video, audio or other format.
2. Related Art
Often, documents are distributed to others in business, government, education and other settings. People in turn read the documents, mark them up, annotate them, comment upon them, etc. The additional markings, annotations, comments, etc. are often lost. Annotated documents end up thrown in garbage cans, shredded, left in conference rooms, stacked on desks, dumped in file cabinets or shoved into shelves—never to see again the light of day. Even if these documents are scanned, photographed or otherwise captured or preserved, the annotations are lost from access except as someone—page by page—revisits the documents and reads the annotations.
Accordingly, companies, institutions, universities, doctor offices and individuals lose valuable information. At best, some of the annotations are transcribed and end up in email messages, meeting summaries, patient records, proposed laws, study aids, etc. In these cases, vast amounts of effort and time are wasted in recapturing (re-typing, re-wording, re-working) what was already done.
The present invention solves these and other drawbacks and problems in the art.